Do lazy people scale better than busy people?

My friend Jenn McCarron offered a comment too insightful to leave alone: "Today I performed how lazy we can all get in a few years once this [tool that can save us lots of effort] is up and running over everything we do." Yes! We must get more lazy to have better lives and better work. Being lazy is also the only way we will deliver scalable outcomes for our business objectives. Machine intelligence will help us scale. If we want to succeed building with machines we must find the lazy people in our organizations…and reward them. Yep, let's get weird.

Jenn's contextual definition of "lazy" means an efficient and effective work ethic. Not a work ethic where we don't try. Let's create an acronym: Leveraged Adaptation, Zero Yak Shaving. In engineering culture we proudly say "The best engineer is a lazy engineer." In this context "lazy" means a person who solves the root problem, in a system context, with elegance, and a forward-looking view. Let's unpack these words with a medical analogy.

• The root problem is the disease that causes the experienced symptoms. Treating symptoms has value. But if the disease is chronic the symptoms may persist regardless of continued treatment.
• System context is observing the symptoms within the context of the body and tracing the upstream causes and downstream effects. It is finding the diseased organ within the body and the other distressed systems that contribute to the disease and produce knock on effects.
• Elegance is the simplest effort necessary to restore balance to the system. It is unblocking the artery that removes stress on the heart and allows tissue to recover because it gets the inputs it needs to heal and function.
• The forward-looking view is figuring out where things are going, and choosing actions that adapt the system to be ready for what is to come, informed by what happened. It is changing dietary and exercise habits to improve the cardiopulmonary capacity of the system so it can thrive in the more demanding environment of keeping up with grandchildren in Disney World.

LAZY is optimization of effort for a realm of boundless opportunity and constrained resources. If you direct a portfolio of investments focused on scale, you should seek Pareto principle flavored opportunities. Your team must identify repeat-play customer efforts that do not require unreasonable effort to address. Your team must solve problems with experiences people will actually use to deliver the value. Your team must build a delivery system with smart fixed costs that produce rapidly diminishing incremental unit costs. Otherwise, you are not focusing on scale and should consider a services business built primarily on human capital. How can we start being LAZY?

Look for patterns and look for people who look for patterns. If the people who own work say things like "The work I do is different every time." that person might be great at a smaller number of operations that are impactful, but this person is not going to deliver scale. If you ask this person to scale, they will ask you for headcount and/or spend for external human capital. Every. Single. Time. That's a pattern too. It is often the pattern of BUSY people (Building Unnecessary Stress for Yourself).

Reward process change and value delivered. Asking people to invest in a different pattern asks them to take risk. Create the conditions for the impact of their work to be seen on a timeline that helps them survive the tournament and be rewarded. If noisy, busy people are rewarded then people will rationally get busier and noisier when they should get LAZYer.

Find interesting, systems-spanning problems. Look for work that should be easier, but no one seems to understand how the work is actually done. And that work slow lots of other work that matters down.

Put your LAZYest people on your systems spanning problems. Invest in their systems thinking and communication capabilities. Reward them for operating across their boundaries to identify and solve righteous problems with LAZY approaches. And get the busy people out of their way.

Gratitude

Thank you Jenn McCarron for helping me get LAZY'er.

Thank you Kyle Bahr for the lead art work for this post.

Thank you D. Casey Flaherty for providing most of the source thinking behind this with his Scary Stories about our Wicked Problems (Legal Nerd Halloween) | 3 Geeks and a Law Blog (geeklawblog.com) post. ??????

Appendix-XKCD You Must See

If you are still reading you will probably enjoy xkcd. Some of my favorites follow.

xkcd: Automation

xkcd: Is It Worth the Time?

xkcd: The General Problem

xkcd: Optimization